11 thoughts on “Rhino dehorned”

I heard on the news on Monday that 620 rhinos have been slaughtered by poachers for their horns so far this year.

The Kragga Kamma Game Park is a small reserve within the Port Elizabeth metro’s boundaries, (not 10km from where I live.) The dehorning and subsequent publicity will perhaps ‘save’ this family. It has been known for poachers to slaughter dehorned rhino anyway, there is obviously some horn left (after the dehorning, plus it continues to grow, albeit very slowly) but such are the profits involved that they shoot them anyway!

I still say legalise the trade and make it worthwhile for farmers to breed rhinos. It has been shown that they breed well in capitivity, but who wants to own a rhino? Its too damn dangerous and expensive. Banning the trade is certainly not working. CITES is as corrupt as FIFA. Vanuatu in the South Pacific has a much say on the trade of rhino horn as South Afirca. A few thousand dollars to the Vanuatu representative encourages him to vote against the trade so that the value of existing horns goes up. Stock shortage increases the value. And while they are about it, get rid of those bloody self-serving charities that aim to prevent rhino poaching. All they do is raise the profiles of the idiots who front them and provide employment for ineffective do-gooders. A bit of common sense is called for.

Mornin’ Soutie. It is a shame that such measures need to be taken to protect the rhino and, even then, success is not guaranteed, but it’s better than nothing I read elsewhere last week that the SA courts are applying eye-watering sentences for convicted poachers – decades in jail, which ought to be a deterrent, but probably won’t be. I would prefer summary justice applied by the rangers out in the bush. ”Oh look, this poor chap pressed both his wrists against the barrel of my shotgun which then went off accidentally. What a mess of bone and blood and how will he ever able to handle his poaching rifle again?”

Seriously though, the main target has to be be the Asian ‘medicinal’ market. The practitioners don’t need to keep bears in cages with catheters attached to extract bile; they don’t need to catch a shark, saw it’s fin off and throw the bleeding and fatally wounded animal back into the sea; they don’t need ground up tiger bones to make a gullible, well=heeled customer perform like a tiger and they certainly don’t need rhino horn to produce a horn like a rhino. Instead, they need to start acting like they’ve already killed all the bears, sharks, tigers and rhinos. Then what, eh? Barstewards!

I hope this works. The problem is that one is dealing with ignorant people who believe that all these products produce the result they are after – and even if the ‘scientific world’ tells them that a rhino’s horn has no medicinal value, or offers an alternative, they will continue to hunt to extinction rhinos, tigers and every other such animal.

I agree with Sipu’s sentiments but legalising the trade would not stop the poachers, I doubt if it would even dent the demand, as with all high value items (gold, diamonds) there will always be people trying to make a profit illegally.

The answer is to somehow bring the price down! Horns apparently sell for $100,000 a kilo (or more!)

It is well known that rhino horn is simply keratin, that’s the stuff we all have plenty of (fingernails, hair etc.) If we could somehow produce / harvest keratin, flood the markets at perhaps $10 per kilo the poachers would no longer bother.

Actually a good punishment would be to hang the poachers in cages in public and cut off an inch of their ‘horn’ every few days until they died from exsanguination or plain rot, hopefully screaming.
“For the encouragement of the others”!